It is broadly known that Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website on the Internet, but the English Wikipedia now has over 4 million articles and 29 million total pages. Much less attention has been given to traffic patterns and trends in content viewed. The Wikimedia Foundation makes available aggregate raw article view data for all of its projects.
This article attempts to convey some of the fascinating phenomena that underlie extremely popular articles, and perhaps more importantly to editors, discusses how this information can be used to improve the project moving forward. While some dismiss view spikes as the manifestation of shallow pop culture interests (e.g., Justin Bieber is the 6th most popular article over the past 3 years, see Tab. 2), these are valuable opportunities to study reader behavior and to shape the public perception of our projects.
We have begun producing two weekly charts on the most popular articles on Wikipedia, the WP:5000 list, and the moderated WP:5000/Top25Report.
WP:5000, an automated list of the 5,000 most popular pages on Wikipedia, is now being compiled weekly. It also identifies how many featured articles, good articles, and lists are included. For the current list covering January 27 to February 2, we find 239 featured articles and 468 good articles in the top 5000 pages. However, this report is based on raw data and includes non-article pages and popularly requested redlinks, like "Com/fluendo/plugin/KateDec.class" at No. 15 on the current list (a script used to stream media content; see Cortado (software)), as well as 18k Gold Watch at position 166, a recurring entry likely fueled by spambots. More information on how the WP:5000 results are computed is found below.
The WP:5000/Top25Report is a manually moderated weekly Top 25 list started in January 2013 of the most popular articles on English Wikipedia. Similar in format to best-selling book or music charts, it is a bit more user friendly in that it excludes non-article pages, likely DOS attack entries, and the Main page. It also tracks how long an article has remained in the Top 25. Throughout January 2013, certain American football-related pages have been popular (a yearly trend seen during the playoff season of that sport), as well as popular recently released movies such as Django Unchained and notable recent deaths such as Aaron Swartz.
Articles which are "extremely popular" on Wikipedia fall into the category of either (1) occasional or isolated popularity, or (2) consistent popularity.
The prime sources of occasional or isolated popularity include:
| Rank | Article | Date (UTC) | Views/hr | Views/sec | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Whitney Houston | 12 Feb 2012 | 1532302 | 425.6 | Death of subject |
| 2 | Amy Winehouse | 23 Jul 2011 | 1359091 | 377.5 | Death of subject |
| 3 | Steve Jobs | 6 Oct 2011 | 1063665 | 295.5 | Death of subject |
| 4 | Madonna (entertainer) | 6 Feb 2012 | 993062 | 275.9 | Super Bowl halftime |
| 5 | Osama bin Laden | 2 May 2011 | 862169 | 239.5 | Death of subject |
| 6 | The Who | 7 Feb 2010 | 567905 | 157.8 | Super Bowl halftime |
| 7 | Ryan Dunn | 20 Jun 2011 | 522301 | 145.1 | Death of subject |
| 8 | Jodie Foster | 14 Jan 2013 | 451270 | 125.4 | Golden Globes speech |
| Rank | Article |
|---|---|
| 1 | Wiki |
| 2 | |
| 3 | United States |
| 4 | YouTube |
| 5 | |
| 6 | Justin Bieber |
| 7 | Glee (TV series) |
| 8 | Sex |
| 9 | Wikipedia |
| 10 | Lady Gaga |
| 11 | Eminem |
| 12 | How I Met Your Mother |
| 13 | United Kingdom |
| 14 | The Big Bang Theory |
| 15 | India |
| 16 | World War II |
Meanwhile, reasons for long-term popularity are somewhat more intuitive. Tab. 2 shows the most popular articles over the last ~3 years. In addition to the broad underlying cultural and academic interests of Wikipedia's audience, we encourage the reader to consider:
The impetus behind storing these statistics was to better understand damage response on Wikipedia (the dissertation topic of author User:West.andrew.g). By storing statistics for every article at the finest granularity possible (hourly), it becomes possible to accurately estimate the number of readers who saw any particular article version. While practical writings have often focused on the time to revert of damaging edits, we argue that the quantity of persons who view it is the more relevant metric. Vandalism that survives for days on an obscure article is effectively harmless if no one visits that article.
Fig. 1 plots the CDF of both the lifespan and view count of about 500,000 recent damaging edits. As the graph shows, at median just 1 person will be exposed to a damaging edit. Such an impressive figure is a testament to the automated (e.g. ClueBot NG) and semi-automated (e.g., Huggle and STiki) mechanisms that have recently been brought to bear on the task. While these tools produce probabilistic measures of damage, only STiki will soon integrate an article's popularity into its prioritization schema.
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Fig. 1 also shows that ~10% of damaging edits are viewed by 100+ persons. Deeper analysis shows that many of the associated survival times are quite short, and these are often the result of damage to extremely popular articles. With the human latency already quite minimal (and a certain amount of latency being inherent), new solutions are needed. Consider that spammers could opportunistically target very popular pages to exploit these brief windows of opportunity. [3] Dynamically and autonomously moving articles in and out of "page protection" or "pending changes" based on their traffic patterns is another possible use-case for this data. As Fig. 2 demonstrates, the power-law distribution of views over articles would suggest relatively few articles need to be protected to have significant impact.
Spam and vandalism are surface-level issues. Recent analysis of deleted revisions on English Wikipedia showed copyright violations, being much harder to detect in casual patrolling work, to have significant lifespans and end-user exposures. [4] This finding has motivated research into autonomous means of copyright violation discovery (see WP:Turnitin).
Article popularity can also be a measure for deciding which articles to improve, a concept already familiar to WikiProjects who keep tabs on the popularity of articles within their project (e.g., Wikipedia:WikiProject Songs has a watchlist for the 1,500 most popular song articles). At the aggregate level, the distribution of page views follows a "power law distribution". Fig. 2 represents one months' views on Wikipedia graphed against a Zipf distribution (a distribution where the most frequent item will occur approximately twice as often as the next item, three times as often as the third item, and so forth.)
The top 25 most viewed pages represent 4% of all total views, and the top 5000 represent 19% of all views. Though the distribution has an extremely long tail, the top 5000 data provides an opportunity to locate popular but poorly written articles that need attention, as opposed to randomly selecting one of the 4.15 million remaining articles on the project. That is not to say that articles deep in the long tail are less important, but for editors interested in prioritizing article improvement based on popularity and effect on public perception, the WP:5000 data is an important tool.
These statistics also provide an opportunity to study what is popular in contemporary culture. Before the growth of the Internet, the primary quantitative measures of contemporary popularity included bestselling book and music charts, box office sales, and television and radio ratings. The digital age now gathers vast quantities of data on consumption not previously available, but some observations from the past still hold true. The fact that Justin Bieber was the sixth most popular article from 2010–12, far ahead of more critically appreciated talent, is consistent with what James D. Hart (author of The Oxford Companion to American Literature) observed in 1950 in writing about the most popular books of the mid-19th century:
| “ | If a student of taste wants to know the thoughts and feelings of the majority who lived during Franklin Pierce's administration [1853–57], he will find more positive value in Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter or T.S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room than he will in Thoreau's Walden [the former being far more popular] – all books published in 1854.... Usually the book that is popular pleases the reader because it is shaped by the same forces that mold his non-reading hours, so that its dispositions and convictions, its language and subject, re-create the sense of the present, to die away as soon as that present becomes the past.[5] | ” |
Thus, in the same way, page view statistics permit us to consider that Justin Bieber and One Direction—as maligned as they may be critically—are more popular and likely influential on culture, than say, Kendrick Lamar, chosen by Pitchfork Media as releasing the best album of 2012.[6]
All the statistics in this article were produced by aggregating raw data made available by the WMF. This data contains hourly hit data on a per article basis for all WMF language/project combinations. Since Jan. 1, 2010 User:West.andrew.g has been parsing these files nightly and storing the English Wikipedia (article namespace) portions to a database hosted at the University of Pennsylvania. This is a non-trivial undertaking, consuming 1TB+ yearly. In addition to being the basis for several academic results [3][4] (and motivated by earlier third-party work[7]), he has more recently begun publishing the aforementioned weekly reports of the top 5000 articles, made available monthly reports for 2012, and released the source code behind these computations.
Others have used the same data for alternative purposes: User:Henrik has developed a tool for looking up the traffic history of specific articles. The Wikitrends site concentrates on dramatic popularity increases/decreases. WMF analyst Erik Zachte produces WikiStats, which provides a higher-level perspective on all WMF projects in numerous statistical dimensions. Mr. Zachte also has a fascinating portfolio of his WMF statistical work. These Wikipedia/WMF-specific resources complement other Internet-scale observations regarding search and popularity; most famously the Google Zeitgeist.
There are some caveats in interpreting this data. First, this is a raw presentation of traffic and popularity. It is known that English Wikipedia traffic has generally been increasing over time (per [1]). This fact, and the growing Internet connectivity that likely underlies it, lends some bias to more recent events. Second, it should be mentioned that logs may have under reported page view data in early 2010.
Article feedback, at least through talk pages, has been a part of Wikipedia since its inception in 2001. The use of these pages by new editors, though, has typically been limited at best.
As part of the Wikimedia Foundation's (WMF) Public Policy Initiative, a specialized form of article feedback was developed and added to a selected set of English Wikipedia articles in September 2010 (see Signpost coverage). Over the next several months, the tool was tweaked several times, resulting in several iterations until version four was deployed to every English Wikipedia article in July 2012. This iteration allowed readers to rate articles from one to five stars in four categories: trustworthiness, objectivity, completeness, and how well it was written.
In December 2011, the WMF began the transition to adding version five (also known as AFTv5) to 10% of the articles, aiming for a full deployment in the first quarter of this year. Version five added an area where readers could give written feedback on articles. The feedback is directed to a centralized page, with various options, including seeing feedback from specific articles or only articles on your watchlist. Editors have the ability to feature a post, mark the concern as resolved, hide the post or request oversight, up- or down-vote a post, or flag the comment as abuse.
A request for comment (RfC) on the project was opened by MZMcBride in mid-January 2013. His impetus, as described in a Signpost op-ed in August 2012, was that the extension was "deployed without anti-abuse mechanisms", leading to the feedback area becoming a "safe haven for spam and other useless noise." In addition, he told the Signpost:
| “ | I've been seeing a dichotomy between tools that help editors reduce backlogs and tools that create new backlogs. For tools that create new backlogs, I think there must be a clear demonstration from the community (or whoever is expected to work on these backlogs) that they're interested in creating these piles of work. In the case of AFTv5, there hasn't been such a demonstration, as far as I'm aware. Compare to [AFTv5 to] tools such as Page Curation that help editors reduce the backlog of unpatrolled new pages. In that case, the tool is helping, not hurting, and there's sufficient community consensus that we want new articles. | ” |
In his view the feedback tool should be used only on an opt-in basis, where editors who are interested in the article—e.g. someone who wrote the piece and wishes to solicit feedback on how they can improve it further—will actually respond to the feedback. He believes the new backlogs are a burden, and deploying the tool to the entire site would make the issue worse. This has a strong basis in fact: according to the WMF, readers submitted an average of 4100 posts per day, of which fewer than 10% were moderated. These figures have fallen since that blog post. When scaled to the full site, the WMF expected that over 900,000 posts per month, or over 30,000 a day, would come in via the feedback tool—a figure per month more than all of the current feedback put together.
A more radical viewpoint was put forward by GregJackP, who simply stated that "the tool is useless" and that the community "should eliminate the feature." He expanded on his views to the Signpost, saying that he believes the most feedback is blank, "a general statement of dissatisfaction or satisfaction, or just garbage/spam." In GregJackP's assessment, the amount of time it takes for editors to find the positive feedback is far outweighed by the "garbage", and the positive feedback is typically " just a question that you have to research and determine if it [is] something that can even be found."
Contrary to this view, editors like Mike Cline believe that the tool is becoming a major source of data for how the public views Wikipedia. Tom Morris eloquently stated:
| “ | Shutting down the article feedback tool rather than improving it is a bad strategy. We do need better tools for churning through AFT5 responses and patrolling them. We need something like Huggle or STiki to do basic triage on the feedback we get, to remove libel and the "OMG I LOVE JUSTIN BIEBER" type things. The rest, though, those are telling us about potentially fixable issues with Wikipedia. If a reader, in good faith, wishes to give us feedback about an article, we should listen. We might set the feedback to one side because we aren't the sort of editors who can necessarily do anything about it. But if we stop listening to readers who have information that can improve the article, what's the damn point? | ” |
Oliver Keyes, the community liaison for the article feedback program, acknowledged the low level of moderation to the Signpost: "Are there sufficient resources to moderate and respond to all of the feedback? The honest answer is 'probably not'." However, he then related the issue to Wikipedia as a whole: "I don't see this as a problem: we're a wiki. Always have been, always will be. Edits will need oversighting or deleting, bad edits will slip through the cracks, and we accept that because it's necessary to produce the good things that an open system gives us. I see no reason not to take the same attitude with feedback."
Keyes told the Signpost that between 30 and 60 percent of all feedback was rated by editors as 'useful', which was a finding backed up by the fourth quarter report from the article feedback team, which reported that 40% of a random sampling in February through April was found to be helpful by at least two editors. In addition, he says that the WMF communicated its goals through the program through 17 different office hours on IRC (held at different times to target different regions of the world), mailing lists, and the village pump, in addition to the project talk page and a regular newsletter. The latter two alone reached at least 220 people, and probably more, far more than any typical Wikipedia discussion.
Still, the current request for comment has a large majority in favor of GregJackP's comment, more than double the second-most supported view (MZMcBride's) at the time of writing. The RfC will remain open until February 21.
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This week, we took a trip to WikiProject Norway. Started in February 2005, WikiProject Norway has become the home for almost 34,000 articles about the world's best place to live, including 16 Featured Articles, 19 Featured Lists, and nearly 250 Good Articles. The project works on a to do list, maintains a categorization system, watches article alerts, and serves as a discussion forum. Interested editors should sign their name to the project's membership list and add the project's page to their watchlist. We interviewed Mentoz86, Hordaland, and Arsenikk.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Norway? Do you live in Norway? Have you contributed to any of the project's Good or Featured Articles?
Do you speak Norwegian? Have you contributed to either of the Norwegian Wikipedias? Why do two versions of Wikipedia exist for the Norwegian language?
Are there any significant gaps in the coverage of Norway on the English Wikipedia? Are some regions or time periods better represented than others? What can be done to fill the gaps?
The project has several Featured and Good Topics related to public transportation in Oslo. Was there a concerted effort to get these articles to their current status? Are some topics easier for the average Wikipedian to contribute to than others?
Does WikiProject Norway collaborate with the projects of any neighboring countries? Are there any regional projects that could become a space for collaborative work on Scandinavian topics?
What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll summarize all the most important information in an infobox. Until then, wade through our antiquated sentences and paragraphs in the archive.
Reader comments
This week, the Signpost's featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured portals, a small yet active part of the project. We interviewed FPOC directors Cirt and OhanaUnited.
Cirt
We've had a bunch of portals promoted to Featured Portal quality in 2012 among a diverse group of subjects, including: Animation, Arts, Conservatism, Indonesia, History, Maryland Roads, and New England. So far in 2013, we've promoted portals Bollywood, Cheshire, Massachusetts, and Society. I've personally worked on two of these: Arts and Society, as part of the Main Page Featured Portal drive. This is an effort to improve all portals linked from the top-right navigation of the Main Page to Featured quality. We've only got two more portals left to improve all the way up to Featured status in this quality improvement drive, Geography and Technology; the former is almost there and the latter is coming along nicely. It's been fun helping out with the quality improvement process of portals in the past year. Hopefully it won't take too much longer to complete the Main Page Featured Portal drive, and that will serve as a good model for future contributors to portals.
OhanaUnited
Being a small project is a double-edged sword. On one hand, we rarely (if ever) have to deal with vandals and other wiki-drama. On the other hand, our target audience is not as much as some article pages and therefore portals are less frequently maintained even though the articles showcased in the portal may be more up to date. Often there is a lot of inertia from the community and we have less capital to work with when the total number of votes matter a lot in a discussion. Just over a year ago, there were a number of good ideas presented to increase the visibility of portals. Including Cirt's idea of improving the portals listed on the main page to featured status, most of the ideas presented have received strong support and implemented. The one idea, championed by myself, would involve changing the standard bullet points on the main page to diagrams that reflect the portal. Even though it has already been implemented in German Wikipedia's home page (where the idea of portals originated), the effort involved in getting this implemented in English Wikipedia would be far too much. At this point, we're aiming for more participants in the featured portals candidate process.
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Seven featured articles were promoted this week:
Four featured lists were promoted this week:
Eleven featured pictures were promoted this week:
Four featured portals were promoted this week:
| External image | |
|---|---|
 The xkcd cartoon on the Star Trek Into Darkness dispute |
| “ | When it comes to world class pedantry, few groups can challenge the prowess of Wikipedians and Star Trek fans. So when the two come together it's little surprise they create a swirling maelstrom of anal retention from which no common sense can escape.[1] | ” |
The comic xkcd drew attention to one of Wikipedia's bitter title debates on 30 January 2013 with this cartoon. The topic: the capitalisation or non-capitalisation of the word "into" in the title of the upcoming Star Trek film, Star Trek Into Darkness. The question had generated tens of thousands of words of discussion on the article's talk page, as well as various subpages.
Given that Wikipedia's Manual of Style directs that prepositions with four letters or less should not normally be capitalised in titles, the discussion hinged on whether "Star Trek into darkness" should be understood as a single phrase, like "the journey into space", or whether the word "into" marked the beginning of a subtitle whose first word should be capitalised. Another factor was that the film's makers and most media reports capitalised the word "Into" in the film's title. A minority view also advocated that it should be seen as a subtitle (like other Star Trek movies) and therefore needed a colon, i.e. "Star Trek: Into Darkness".
In his Daily Dot article, titled "Wikipedians wage war over a capital 'I' in a 'Star Trek' film", Morris summarized the entire affair in the quote above, and cited User:Frungi to give his readers a brief summary of arguments in favour of an upper-case or lower-case spelling, saying he did not want want his readers to experience in "excruciating detail the main arguments from both sides. They are exhaustive and pedantic to such an extent that 'pedantic' no longer seems a suitable adjective."
Frungi's summary, compiled on 11 January, read:
Morris chose to use a capital I throughout his article, saying he agreed with the passionate sentiments of an anonymous vandal who told Wikipedians to read the official website.
The Independent weighed in on the controversy a day later, on 31 January 2013 ("Trekkies take on Wikis in a grammatical tizzy over Star Trek Into Darkness"), asking its resident grammarian Guy Keleny to adjudicate.
Keleny acknowledged the ambiguity introduced by the missing colon, which allowed an interpretation of the title along the lines of "This is the story of the Star Trek into Darkness", but concluded:
| “ | There’s only one thing to do. Follow the preference of the film-makers. It is their title, after all. They call it Star Trek Into Darkness—so that is what it is. In the same way, for instance, everybody accepts that the singer is called k d lang. Her typographical peculiarity may be pretentious and irritating, but her name belongs to her. | ” |
Science fiction news site Blastr took much the same view. The title of the Wikipedia entry was changed from lower-case to upper-case spelling on 31 January.
On 30 January 2013, Rebecca J. Rosen, senior associate editor of The Atlantic, reported on a paper by Jeff Loveland and Joseph Reagle which argues that rather than being a break with the past, Wikipedia and Wikipedians are actually part of a long tradition of "obsessive compilers" that created "not just encyclopedias, but dictionaries, medical texts, histories, and even object collections, such as herbaria". Loveland and Reagle note a commonality between the methods used to build Wikipedia and various "encyclopedias of old":
| “ | ... the process of building upon existing work bit by bit, or what the authors call "stigmergic accumulation." Now, that's a mouthful, but it's also a great metaphor. "Stigmergy," they write, describes "how wasps and termites collectively build complex structures by adding to the product of previous work rather than by communicating directly among themselves." | ” |
Piracy and other types of "borrowing" in such endeavours were common. Ephraim Chambers' 1728 Cyclopaedia "borrowed heavily from the Dictionnaire de Trevoux," and in turn was reprinted in full by Scottish "pirates". Chambers himself confessed that the Cyclopaedia contained "little ... new, and of my own growth."
| “ | Men like Chambers were always a bit author, a bit compiler, a bit borrower, a bit editor. If Wikipedia complicates the notion of "authorship," it's not as though that notion were ever simple to begin with.
Even Wikipedia's open ideology has antecedents during this period. Diderot announced that people were free to reuse the art from his Encyclopedie—"a stance," the authors note, "probably meant to justify his and his colleagues' appropriation of illustrations from the 'Description des arts et metiers.'" |
” |
Wikipedia's collaborative approach, too, is really a function of the size of the task, and has its precedents in previous projects of comparable magnitude. Something very much like a crowdsourcing approach was used to compile the Oxford English Dictionary for example. Thousands of people contributed to the effort, sending in slips of paper noting words in their context. Diderot's and d'Alembert's encyclopedia had over 140 different contributors.
Jeff Loveland, a historian of encyclopedias, had previously reviewed Reagle's book Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia and criticized it for having "one major weakness, namely in historical contextualization" (see report in the 28 November 2011 issue of the Signpost). The ensuing discussions between Loveland and Reagle led to this collaboration.
Following the deployment of the Wikidata client to the Hungarian Wikipedia last month, the client was also deployed to the Italian and Hebrew Wikipedias on Wednesday. The next target for the client, which automatically provides phase 1 functionality (surfacing interwikis stored on the central wikidata.org repository), is the English Wikipedia, with a deployment date of 11 February already set. Barring any unforeseen problems, all other Wikipedias will get the client by the end of the month (non-Wikipedia projects not being the focus of phase 1).
Perhaps more importantly, the much more adventurous "data repository" phase of the project remains firmly on course to be completed (and deployed) before the original project completion date of 31 March despite the significant delays to phase 1. With that deployment, users will "be able to create a property 'child'... [and] add a statement to the item for Marie Curie using this property to say that she is the mother of Irène Joliot-Curie and Ève Curie. ... [In addition,] you can support all of these statements by adding references to them." Communities will be left to decide whether and how they wish to use these statements onwiki, but the expectation is that they will be used to turn wikidata.org into what amounts to a central repository for infoboxes.
Some preliminary work from phase 2 went live on Wikidata.org on Monday (example; accompanying blog post). As of time of writing, the eventual fate of the planned third phase (dynamic lists) remains more uncertain.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
